Welcome to Word Vomit Wednesday! A series of blog posts about a specific topic from current events that I, and sometimes the rest of the Internet, ruminate obsessively about. All thoughts/opinions/experiences are my own; I don’t claim anything that I write to represent anyone other than myself.

This week started off with a BANG (welcome to Scorpio season!). #IndictmentMonday did not disappoint those of us who have been waiting for some small dose of sanity and justice to peek it’s head through this dumpster fire of a year. Also, can we just let it sink in that it’s been almost exactly ONE YEAR since the election? This short period of time has felt like what I imagine living in a dimension where the Upside Down and all three seasons of Rick and Morty banged would be like. Potentially super entertaining to watch, in reality an absolute nightmare. And since none of us seem to have a portal gun to use to escape or Eleven’s powers to fight back, it’s been a little rough. It hasn’t been all bad, though. Having these turds in the White House has woken a lot of people up to how sick this country is and how it’s been sick from the beginning.

You can’t come to a land already inhabited by people, start murdering and raping them and then claim your intentions are for the pursuit of happiness. You can’t build a nation on the unpaid and often abused and raped backs of people you stole from another continent and claim to believe in freedom and justice for all. As a country, we have not dealt with the fact that our nation was founded in the near-genocide of a majority of our native people and cemented in the slavery of black people. If we cannot address our past, we will never heal. We won’t be able to create the solutions that will actually be helpful for all Americans and we will never be the land of the free and home of the brave. We will remain a place where people who are considered “other” will be continually fighting the limitations put on them and where too many white people will remain cowards. That’s the real conspiracy of the United States. The American Dream does not exist. We’ve grown up believing a complete lie.

I do have hope that things can be turned around. Because we’re not a particularly old country, I would say this could be seen as a huge growth spurt. We’re either going to come out of this an even bigger butthead or we will start learning how to walk our talk. In my own experience, I feel much more involved in our political landscape than I ever have before. I feel like I have so many more resources about how to understand how our institutions work and the best ways to contact our representatives to make our voices heard. Growing up it was instilled in me how important it was to do our civic duties. For the longest time for me, that only included voting and jury duty. I remember thinking that if I really got involved in the political landscape I wouldn’t be able to pursue other dreams that I wanted for my life.

Obviously, that was a very extreme conclusion I came to. It has become clearer that politics don’t need to take over, but do need to be some sort of an active presence in our lives. Just like anything we need to do for ourselves: vacuuming, running errands, and picking up the kids from school. Keeping in touch with our representatives to express our concerns somehow needs to be normalized as something we actively engage in because it just needs to be done. Not only that, but as I become a more active participant in my own life in many other ways, the happier I am and the less disappointed and apathetic if things don’t go my way.

The only way for this country to reach the potential of greatness that it has is if everyone becomes more active in some way. We put so much emphasis on vague words. What if, instead, we clarified what the word “freedom” actually means or the word “great”? If you talk to different people about what “freedom,” “great,” “liberty,” “American Dream,” etc., mean to them you’ll probably get a lot of different answers. There’s so much intellectual capital in this country that maybe if we just start to clarify what values these words and symbols actually represent, we could start working toward incorporating those values.

America doesn’t have to be great again. We’re already great and we’re awesome enough and strong enough to tackle these major demons of ours. What America needs is to grow up.

Katie Louchheim fails A LOT at #adulting which has made her smarter, more curious, assertive, and generally in a near-constant state of frustration.